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Reference Types

There are several different types of content in OR.

  • Overview pages: there is an Overview page for every unique sense of a term (or topic) in OR. They provide free navigational guides to a topic and contain a heading, a short definition from an OR entry, and links to a selection of other OR entries on that topic and to related topics. Overview pages are free to view and provide gateways to our content by giving users a quick guide around the available OR content on a particular topic.
  • Subject reference: entries from the general reference content in OR. These are A-Z titles (Encyclopedias, Companions, and Dictionaries) which provide subject-area coverage (e.g. Art, Law, Zoology) and go beyond simple definitions of terms to provide contextual encyclopedic information -- the ‘who, what, and how’ as well as the ‘what does that word mean?’. You will find different subject perspectives on the same topics – so the entry on Othello in The Oxford Dictionary of Dance  will offer a different subject perspective to an entry on Othello from The Oxford Dictionary of Plays.
  • Timelines: timelines of events, arranged according to world history, areas, and themes.
  • Quotations: entries from dictionaries of quotations, which tell you who said what, about what, and when.
  • English dictionaries: entries from lexical dictionaries which give English language definitions of terms. They primarily answer the question ‘what does that mean’ rather than provide the more encyclopedic information provided by Subject Reference content (the ‘when, why, how, and who’).
  • Bilingual dictionaries: entries from bilingual lexical dictionaries which offer translations of terms in various languages.